


Joel's Birthday

by galadrieljones



Series: The Last of Us: Short Fictions [2]
Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Birthday, Comfort, Father-Daughter Relationship, Feels, Gen, Happy Ending, Healing, Teamwork, post-game setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 10:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14639778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galadrieljones/pseuds/galadrieljones
Summary: About a year after moving into Tommy's compound, life has become a simple treasure in which the past is the past. Ellie gives Joel a special gift for his birthday.





	Joel's Birthday

One day, while out foraging for supplies with Maria in a little truck stop city about fifteen miles from the plant, Ellie discovered a small bulk supply of coffee beans in sealed packaging, hidden away in the dusty corner of an old locked trailer unit of a semi-truck. The weather was warm, and the air smelled like lavender. It was very early summer. Getting into the trailer, they’d had to use bullets, which drew the attention of a couple clickers in a dilapidated gift shop nearby, but Maria was good with traps and she lit them on fire with ease.

“What the fuck?” said Ellie. They stabbed their knives into the air tight plastic bags, and some of the coffee beans spilled out, still smelling faintly of their purpose.  “Noway. Is this still good?”

Maria studied a handful of beans, held it up to her nose. She nodded, certain. “They’re a little stale,” she said. “But yeah. I’d say this is drinkable.”

Together, they hauled it home in secret, strapped it to the backs of their horses in canvas rucksacks. There were two ten pound units, and wasn’t enough to last them forever, but Ellie had an idea. “Maria,” she said. “I know what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing for what?” said Maria as they crested the hill on horseback, overlooking the lit houses below.

“Joel’s birthday,” says Ellie. Her horse shuffled around, a pretty black filly, yet unnamed. “It’s next month, right? I have an idea, but I’m gonna need your help.”

In the coming weeks, Ellie, with help from Tommy and Maria and several other people from the town, secretly began to renovate a small house in the Jackson compound to be a coffee shop with an open mic and a stage, as a birthday present for Joel. Ellie was out of her mind with excitement. They painted the house a light pink and installed a nice, tall counter. They built the stage out of sand bags and two-by-fours. Tommy engineered a bean grinder out of an old blender, using sheer ingenuity and metal burrs put together at the smithy by the plant. With electricity, they could do so much, and Maria’s father even installed a low lighting system to make the café feel romantic and old-fashioned. Several of the women from the town sewed up pillows made of pretty velvet fabrics picked up at an old dress shop in the town of Jackson, and they fashioned the cushions on the floor and as seat cushions as well. According to Maria, Jackson had once been a haven of tourism for the rich and famous looking for reprieves from their hectic city lives, and Ellie thought this was neat.

“Like, movies stars?” said Ellie. 

“Yep,” said Maria. She was painting the counter a rich shade of blue. Maria was a nice portrait of adulthood for Ellie to look up to those days. She was a woman and strong, full of purpose and duty to both Tommy and her city. She took none of this lightly and loved Ellie as a niece. Most of their work on the café they did at night after Joel had kicked off to sleep. He was a night owl sort of man and too canny for his own good, of course, so they had to be quiet. Real quiet. Ellie found herself very tired most days, but she was young and free, and it was worth it.

Meanwhile, Joel had been spending a lot of his time refurbishing several old guitars that he’d salvaged in a mall music shop way out in Cody. Cody had used to be a novelty cowboy town, if he remembered correctly, furnished in a Western aesthetic and made specifically for tourists to come and experience rodeos and cattle drives and country western music shows. It was a pillar of kitsch and the American West, and it made Joel think of Texas, which tended to make him sad. But life had changed now, and there was quiet, and there was music, he tried to remind himself. He had begun to teach Ellie to play the six-string, which was extremely gratifying. He had been playing again, too, when she was asleep, which was early those days, and he was sure nobody was looking—sitting out on the porch of their little yellow house with the blue shutters, he’d look out at the fireflies in the grass, and he was rusty, but each time he touched the strings, he got a little bit closer to the thing he’d used to be. In all earnestness, Joel was still spun by what had happened in Salt Lake. He’d thought about telling Ellie the truth time and time again, but he could not muster the courage. At times it seemed like she knew, and the lie had become a part of the fabric of their lives together. Nobody wanted to acknowledge it, not really. Nobody wanted to think about the horrors of what happened and for now it was easier to just leave it all behind. That was a reality of living.

One day, Joel was going on a routine supply run to the north, and Ellie asked to come with. It had been a little time since they’d traveled together, just the two of them, and so he was happy to have her along. They ended up at a gift shop mini-mall up in Hoback, and Ellie found an old bean bag chair that was psychedelic and had huge pictures of bison and other weird mountain animals and American flags with tie-dyed fabric, and this seemed to delight her beyond comprehension. At some point, they stumbled upon a patch of runners in a china shop and took them by surprise with a couple of molotovs, and afterward, they rummaged some more and found some silverware and Ellie found some pretty ceramic mugs that she seemed oddly attached to, and then they saddled up their horses, and Ellie was strapping that bean bag chair to the back of her unnamed filly along with the mugs and a bag of sugar, and Joel became curious.

“Can you even ride with that thing on there?” he said, as if he did not know already. “What the hell do you plan to do with an old bean bag chair?”

“I’m gonna sit in it,” Ellie said. “Duh. What the fuck else would I do with a bean bag chair?”

The two of them rode home together in relative, comfortable silence after that. Joel noticed that she had been a little odd lately. A little tired, but he chalked it up to her teenage years and maybe some other things, but he was not the sort of man to press. He trusted her earnestness. If she needed something, she’d let him know. 

On the night before Joel’s birthday, Ellie shined up the mugs she’d found in Hoback and also cleaned up the old jukebox that Tommy’s buddy Lou had fixed up about a week before. It now played really weird, old songs by musicians with slicked back hair-dos and leather jackets, and as they were setting up the final layout of the café with tables and chairs and a tall sitting counter, Tommy referred to one of the jukebox musicians as a man named Elvis. It was a good night, and the world was singing around them with anticipation. The gift was nearly complete, and Ellie was starting to get nervous. She painted a sign that said simply: Coffee Shop, with a little picture of a steaming mug and saucer. She thought it should be a simple name, as Joel was a simple kind of man, and he appreciated simple things, and this was a present for him.

The next morning on Joel’s birthday while they were eating pancakes that Ellie had made clumsily all by her self, she told Joel about how she planned to name her new black filly horse Elvis. It was off-hand. She did not mention the cool dude in the jukebox, as that might have tipped him off in some way. Joel asked her what had given her the idea to  name a girl horse after the old dead King of Rock ‘n Roll. But Ellie just said, “Don’t worry about it birthday boy.” And he laughed, seemingly unaware of how loved he was, and she thought excitedly about what was to come.

After the sun went down and the day was complete, Ellie took Joel on an evening walk, and he asked very few questions. He had his hands in his pockets and seemed content, as a man. When they arrived at the Coffee Shop, music was already playing inside—the King himself—and Joel took his hands out of his pockets and looked at her in a quiet confusion. “What’s all this?” he said.

But in that moment, Ellie became bashful. She scuffed her leather boot across the grass and put her hands behind her back. What if he didn’t want it? she thought. She looked down at the ground. “It’s your birthday present,” she said. “Surprise?”

“My birthday present?”

“You didn’t think I’d forget to get you something, did you?”

“Of course not, I—”

Then she looked up, and when she saw that he was surprised and taken aback as he gazed upon her masterpiece—the Coffee Shop—she became confident again and tucked her arm in his and dragged him along to the dusty blue door. “Come on,” she said, and he sort of stumbled along at her side, lost for words as Joel often was, but this time, it was something different.

Inside were all of their friends and family. The room smelled good,  and it was very warm. They called out _Surprise!_ when Joel entered with Ellie. Tommy hugged Joel and told him he looked older and more terrible than he had the day before. Joel laughed at this but he was still mostly quiet. He was speechless. He tried to ask when they’d had time to do all this, but nobody gave him a straight answer. That wasn’t the point. Ellie took him over to the counter, past the psychedelic bean bag chair, where they sat on stools welded together from old car parts. Maria poured them each a cup of hot coffee, using the ceramic mugs Ellie had brought back from Hoback, and she wished him a warm happy birthday, and then she left them alone and joined a little group having Irish coffees by the jukebox.

Joel placed his big hands on the mug to feel its warmth. He closed his eyes. He thought he could feel it again, all those old feelings.  

“Happy birthday, Joel,” said Ellie, just bringing it all together.

He was shocked and undone as he opened his eyes. It was a crushing notion, to belong to her. “Thanks, kiddo,” he said.

They drank their coffee. It was a very good day.


End file.
